W3C Community Groups Drive Web Innovation with more than 1200 Participants in Eight Months

Innovation and Standardization Focus of May W3C Membership Meeting

http://www.w3.org/ — 9 May 2012— Eight months after the launch of W3C Community Groups to speed Web innovation, more than 1200 people are participating in 80 groups with wide-ranging interests, including mobile profiles, Web games, and big data.

"We wanted to encourage richer and more diverse conversations about Web technology at W3C, and we are off to a great start," said Jeff Jaffe, W3C CEO. "A number of design choices (such as the permissive copyright license) have made this an appealing work environment to important stakeholders. The program is young but promising, and will continue to improve as we learn from our community."

Mobile: accelerating the adoption of the Mobile Web as a compelling platform for the development of modern mobile web applications (Core Mobile Web Platform)

Design: delivering alternate image sources based on device capabilities, to prevent wasted bandwidth and optimize display for both screen and print (Responsive Images)

Social: connecting the multidisciplinary research community interested in the study and treatment of low-effort user generated content on the Web (tweets, checkins, status messages, likes,...), called microposts (Microposts)

Games: improving the quality of open web standards that game developers rely on to create games (Games)

Education: improving the overall skill set of the web industry by improving the quality of available web education resources and courses around the world (Web Education)

W3C Membership, Innovation, and Standards

The W3C Membership plays a preeminent role both in Community Groups
and in turning innovations into interoperable, Royalty-Free Web standards through an open consensus process. W3C currently has more than 50 Working Groups creating standards for an Open Web Platform for application development. The technologies, including HTML5, are still maturing and at different rates, but diverse industries have embraced the emerging standards, as many implementers, analysts, and press have noted.

This traction has resulted in more than 80 organizations becoming W3C Members in the past year, including: Baidu, Inc., Cox Communications, Inc., Gemalto SA, Huawei, Irdeto, MStar Semiconductor, Inc., Panasonic Corporation, Qualcomm Innovation Center, Inc., Qihoo 360, Smart Communications Inc., Square Enix Holdings, Telenor, Tencent, The Nielsen Company, and Verizon Wireless. Seven of the
new organizations joined as startup members under a
program announced in February, further diversifying the W3C Membership.

These Members will convene 13-15 May at W3C's semi-annual Advisory Committee meeting. Members and staff will discuss new opportunities for standardization and how to strengthen W3C's standards practices.